Health-Care Haters 101: Why the Right Is Dead-Wrong

One liberal takes a hard look at the hard-line conservatives' case against Obama's plan — and even some of the less far-flung propaganda — and finds the Republican argument ignoring the facts, not to mention the will of the people.

We are reaching the climax of Health Care III: Rise of the Machine Politicians. As in all sequels, we have a cameo from a hoary veteran of the last war — in this case Robert Reich, who suffered through the exact same story arc as Bill Clinton's Secretary of Labor. "If bills aren't passed in the House and Senate before August 7th," he warns, it's "a death sentence for health-care reform. The gravitational pull of the mid-term elections of 2010 will frighten off Blue Dogs and delight Republicans."

August 7. It's a sobering deadline. Especially since waffling and prevarication and outright lies are suddenly sweeping over us like the rogue wave in The Poseidon Adventure.

To better understand the Republican argument against this crazy health-care reform thingie that our Obama is pushing, I turned to the National Review. Although their current cover gives a pretty good idea where the Right thinks he's pushing it, I did my service to the nation by actually reading the entire new issue. This is, after all, the magazine that launched the conservative movement — certainly it had compiled the best possible arguments (at least until Michael Steele did his whole socialism thing yesterday).

Since it isn't available to non-subscribers online, here's a summary:

First, health care is not really about health because life expectancy is pretty much the same in all developed countries. Therefore "any health care 'system' is a giant placebo." Which proves that the real purpose of reform "is not the nationalization of health care but the nationalization of your body."

Second, there are no uninsured Americans. Of the 45 or 50 million without insurance, "one-fifth aren't Americans; another fifth aren't uninsured but are covered by Medicare," another two-fifths are people who think "life is a party," and the final fifth have an income over $75,000 a year and are "opting to bring health care back to being a normal market transaction."

Argument No. 3 gets to the real problem: "Government-directed health care is a profound assault on the concept of citizenship."

This may come as a surprise to all the veterans using VA hospitals, not to speak of the old folks depending on the Medicare they paid for with a lifetime of taxes. But it raises the most fundamental passions of the right wing: "Why is the cost of my health care Barack Obama's business? When he mused recently about whether his dying grandmother had really needed her hip replacement, he gave the game away. Right now, if Gran'ma decides she doesn't need the hip, that's her business."

To hell with Gran'ma! There's a rallying cry for you. It all boils down to this: Who you gonna believe — my ideology or your lying eyes?

But the National Review's real argument comes last: If we pass health-care reform, the magazine warns, elections will come down to an argument about "which party can 'deliver' better 'services' more 'efficiently.'" In other words, the only viable rationale for the Right becomes its claim to be able to run the leftist state more "efficiently" than the Left.

And to back it up, the National Review gives the dreaded example of England, where even the great Maggie Thatcher was reduced to making campaign promises that the National Health Service was "safe in our hands." Where the current conservative leader, David Cameron, called the NHS "one of the greatest achievements of the twentieth century." Also Canada, where the leader of the right-wing Alliance party "found himself forced to make similar prostrations in response to entirely unfounded rumors that the party was thinking of 'permitting' private health care back into the country.'" Also, the bitter knowledge that "Tommy Douglas, the driving force behind Canadian health care, tops polls of all-time greatest Canadians."

Sacre bleu! In other words, in the words of the National Review itself, the real danger is that health-care reform might be popular — that Americans will become like the 73 percent of Canadians and Brits who told Gallup pollsters last year that they had confidence in their health-care systems. Which will make them think Democrats can "deliver" better "government" more "efficiently."

A Second Opinion: Blame Both Parties!

And yet like all Americans, I'm worried about the increased deficits and higher taxes and soaring costs if our esteemed public servants screw this up. I was just reading in Newsweekthe warnings of Robert J. Samuelson, a reasonable man and sound economist: "We face an unprecedented collision between Americans' desire for more government services and their almost equal unwillingness to be taxed."

Here's how Samuelson crunches the numbers:

"For the past half century, federal spending has averaged about 20 percent of GDP, federal taxes about 18 percent of GDP, and the budget deficit 2 percent of GDP. The CBO projection for 2020 — which assumes the economy has returned to "full employment" — puts spending at 26 percent of GDP, taxes at a bit less than 19 percent of GDP, and a deficit above 7 percent of GDP. Future spending and deficit figures continue to grow after 2020. What this means is that balancing the budget in 2020 would require a tax increase of almost 50 percent from the past half century's average."

Scary!

However, the fine print reveals complexities. For example, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid total only 8 percent of the GDP — little more than a third of the budget. And as the great moral philosopher Peter Singer points out in a brilliant and essential essay in Sunday's New York Times Magazine, Australia funds its national health care with a mere 1.5 percent tax.

The real problem is "a self-indulgent political culture" that refuses to make tough choices or level with the American people, Samuelson says: "Republicans want to cut taxes without cutting spending. Democrats want to increase spending without increasing taxes, except on the rich. The differences between the two parties are shades of gray."

True, perhaps. Except for this:

A) The Republicans actually ballooned the deficit by $3.35 trillion dollars in just eight years;

B) the Democrats reduced it under Clinton and are now desperately seeking to pay for health care without adding to the deficit. Which is why Congress is having an attack of the vapors right now, conveniently timed to give them a crowd-pleasing excuse to kill reform while pleasing the health-care lobbyists who are busily doling out millions in bribes — excuse me, contributions...

C) the rich have gotten so much richer under Republican rule that they're the only ones with any money left.

And don't forget that just a few months ago, despite all their born-again deficit concerns, Republicans put through a "death tax" break for people who inherit up to $10 million. As Matt Taibbi pointed out in Rolling Stone, "The amendment — which benefits only the top two-tenths of one percent of income earners — hands the country's richest citizens a tax break worth $91 billion."

Not to mention the twelve F-22 fighter jets that Congress just refused to cut even though Defense Secretary Robert Gates told them the Pentagon didn't want them because they are too expensive. They cost about $339 million apiece, and the feds have already spent more than $62 billion on them.

And don't get me started on the costs of the pointless drug war and the prison industrial complex it supports.

If these people can kill health-care reform even under this forceful Democratic administration, we will really have arrived at the fabled naked lunch when we can see what is on the end of everyone's fork: fat, juicy morsels for the rich and warlike, and the usual thin gruel for regular folks.

Bottom line: Ignore the propaganda. A decent health-care system is affordable. The public option is essential. And 76 percent of the American people want it. So if the Republicans and the Blue Dog Democrats manage to kill it in defiance of this overwhelming public desire, remember to punish them at the polls next year. And the year after that. And the year after that. Eventually, they will have to listen.

Questions? Comments? Concerns? Click here to e-mail John H. Richardson about his weekly political column at Esquire.com.

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